Tag: Greece

What’s the News: Chalk up another win for the ancient Greeks. The Greek historian and geographer Strabo wrote nearly 2,000 years ago that Piraeus, a small peninsula near Athens, had once been an island—and a new study in this month’s issue of Geology shows he was right.

Although the image of the Parthenon often featured in history books and tourist brochures is stark white, a new imaging technique revealed that the ancient Greek structure wasn’t always this way. In fact, parts of the building used to be painted blue, like many other sculptures from antiquity.

Pigments remain on other ancient Greek temples, and experts have long suspected that the Parthenon, too, was once brightly colored. But two centuries of searching for minuscule flakes of paint remaining on the Parthenon yielded no results, so it was impossible to confirm that the structure was not always white. To remedy that, a researcher at the British Museum in London created an imaging technique that reveals any remnants of a commonly used ancient pigment known as Egyptian blue, which was commonly used until the year 800 A.D. To use the technique, researcher Giovanni Verri shines red light onto the marble, and any traces of paint that remain absorb the red light and emit infrared light. Viewed through an infrared camera, any parts of the marble that were once blue appear to glow [New Scientist].